Over the last few years there have been massive brute force attacks against wordpress sites wp-login.php.

A quick search for a way of dealing with these attacks, returned methods that used mod_security to identify the attack and then ban the ip using a firewall. I wanted a simple way to ban the ip without using mod_security. So I wrote a bash script that checks how many attempts to login have been made from each ip, if the times are unusually high then the ip gets temporarily banned using ConfigServer Firewall (csf). The script can be placed in crontab so as to have frequent/automated checks. Read more »